The Hearth Roll of 1669 (This counted the number of fire hearths in a house on which tax was levied) states Thomas Acton’s leasing of Bog Hall, Ballygannonbeg & Kilcandra in 1669. This was land seized in 1641 by Oliver Cromwell and granted to Sir Richard Parsons of Birr Castle.
Builder of Kilmacurragh House in 1697. This was one of the first houses built without fortress in Ireland. Its cost was put at £1,500 = €276,848 in today’s value (2006) The Deer Park walls were built for £142-6-1 (€26,265 at today’s values) in this period. 
Forbes ‘Tree Planting in Ireland’ tells of Thomas Acton inventing a Dibbling Tree Planter in 1730.
In 1838 the Acton Estate covered 5,381 acres
Succeeded by Thomas’s brother’s Son - Colonel Charles Annesley Ball Acton (14th February 1876 – 25th September1915)
Charles was born in Bristol and educated in Rugby and Cambridge. He went to work as a booking clerk at Thomas Cook’s travel agents initially working for their office in Holborn. In 1937 he went to Palestine for Thomas Cook and later ran a small library there. He returned to Ireland in 1939 and worked at various things including selling Encyclopaedia Britannica;
he manufactured charcoal as motor fuel during the war and then became involved in selling Proctor’s Tripod Harvesting which was the Austrian way of preparing hay. Another unsuccessful venture was Market Gardening. He helped Herr Budina in running Kilmacurragh Hotel during the war years.
After Reginald Acton’s death, his wife Isabel leased out the property to a Mrs Phillimore who expressed an interest in buying the property and presenting this to the state. The gardens were being looked after by one old man at this stage. He would write to Lady Moore in 1929, wife of Fredrick Moore of the Botanic Gardens Glasnevin when a Rhododendron blooms –
“Let yez come soon, rosydandry falconyera or lowther (Loderi) is an admiration”This was obeyed and proved true! The gardens at this stage started to decline as the area could not be well maintained by only one person.
The House was converted, on lease from Acton’s, to a Hotel from 1933
The hotel was very popular and well used by parties from Dublin. It had the first outdoor swimming pool built in Ireland at the time on the grounds. The wife of one of Charles Budina’s brothers was drowned in the swimming pool![I here insert an extract from the www.wicklow.ie website, which gives extra details of Kilmacurragh as a hotel - D.P.David O'Donoghue,* Sunday Business Post 29 April 2001After the deaths of the brothers Charles Annesley Acton and Reginald Acton, in World War One, the house fell into disrepair. The house lay vacant until it was rented to a German called Charles Budina, who ran the place as a hotel and had a ballroom built in the garden behind the house. This proved to be a very successful venture and for twenty years "Kilmacurra Park Hotel" offered all amenities with the finest continental cuisine at such a reasonable terms as:by Eileen Byrne, typos corrected. Note the alternative spelling of Kilmacurragh.]All food stuff was grown (and manufactured) on the estate."The manufacturing of meat", a brochure for the hotel, boasted "into 100 different table delicacies was carried out for the first time in Ireland at Kilmacurra Park Hotel". During the war years the hotel guests arrived at Glenealy Railway Station and were collected from there in a pony and trap by Michael O'Connor. Because it had such a healthy environment doctors frequently recommended a stay at Kilmacurra, as a tonic, to their patients. Indeed many prominent men in the Dublin medical profession were frequent visitors. A brochure promoting the hotel invited visitors to "bring your children, leave them at Kilmacurra Park Hotel for their annual holidays; they would be safely looked after, and will enjoy a perfectly healthy holiday amidst natural surroundings, and will be fed on the fat of the land, the purest and most wholesome food".
- 3 guineas per week B+B
- 25/- week end Lunch
- 2/6 Tea with meat delicacies 2/-
For over twenty years, Kilmacurra Park Hotel was one of the best known hotels in the country,and many of the local grannies and grandads have some wonderful memories of the good old days when romance first begun to blossom for them to strains of the music of "The Shamrocks Céilí Band" from Arklow or the "Cill Mhantain Round Tower". However at the start of World War Two Charles Budina went back to his native Germany. On his return to Kilmacurra in 1950 a dispute arose about the ownership of the hotel and shortly afterwards it closed down. For a short period, in 1956 it opened as an Irish Summer School.
“In one of Eamon De Valera's cannier wartime moves, he persuaded the British to grant 50 Germans safe passage through what was technically enemy territory. They gathered at the mailboat at Dun Laoghaire on September 11, 1939 amid Nazi salutes and shouts of "Auf Wiedersehen" Charles Budina was among this group.”
The house and part of arboretum area sold to a Wicklowman, Bill Dolan, for use as Hotel in 1992 for £180,000 by the FWS now called Coillte. There were several public protests at this sale and the hotel planning not carried out. Records of the speakers at the protests on a cassette tape held in the Library in the RDS.
In 1996 the House and the Arboretum purchased from Bill Dolan for £240,000 by the OPW and given to the Botanic Gardens to manage and develop in 1997. A lot of clearance and re-planting has being happening since this date and slowly the grounds are being restored to their former glory. The house was secured and made safe, fencing put around the house for safety reasons but the house slowly deteriorating.
